No Panic

No Panic was a training course for youth workers who wanted to improve their interactions with participants experiencing crisis or difficult situations throughout the activities.

The aim of the project was to prepare youth leaders, trainers, project coordinators, and EVS mentors to deal with situations and act accordingly, when participants of their activities experience a crisis and find it difficult to continue with the activity.

What to do when participant finds is too challenging to take an active part in the project? Some of them, for example, had to deal with a situation of a psychological crisis, a sudden death of a close relative, disclosure of a mental disease. Others, in long term projects, may experience intercultural shock or find it extremely difficult to establish satosfactory realtions in the new environment. Do you as a coordinator, trainer, mentor in this situation feel confusion, anxiety and helplessness? Often we can manage to deal with a concrete solution somehow, but with many difficulties. However, there is always a question of how far does our responsibility as a facilitator or coordinator go? And how to be supportive, yet allowing the responsibility for managing this situation to the participant, at the same time? How to deal with our own frustration coming from my limited position?

“Mainly I work with EVS volunteers and with them work is always complex and multitasking for me. I feel pretty much killed in this.”

What has changed?

“I have had a conversation, during which I payed a lot of attention to keep the balance of listening and giving back the feedback to the person I was speaking with.”

~ participant from Poland

“I didnt think about that side of myself before [starting positive and empowering conversations]”

What has changed?

“I try bring up the positives and give alternatives to things we can change”

~ other participant from Poland

“I’m pretty weak at noticing strengths”

What has changed?

“During a group project, everyone in the group was given a certain task to do, even though the task we handed to each other seemed randomly given, i noticed that they were perfectly picked to suit the knowledge we had on that part of the project.”

~ participant from Macedonia

“I need more practice but need some time to reach a better performace [to facilitate events with “difficult” participants]”